reverseproxy.md

Documentation by @ychaouche

Owncloud with a Reverse Proxy

The purpose of setting up a reverse proxy is to make urls look different. Some may prefer URL rewriting but since there is no need to do any if conditions or URL matching, a reverse proxy seems to fit perfectly for this job.

So we want http://cloud.domain.tld to appear as http://roundcube.domain.tld/cloud to circumvent the CSRF browser protection.

First, let's setup our roundcube's apache server to act as a reverse proxy for owncloud :

On the roundcube server

Add these directives to your roundcube vhost to make it act as a reverse proxy for owncloud when looking for the /cloud URL.

  ProxyPass  "/cloud/" "http://cloud.example.com/"
  ProxyPassReverse "/cloud/" "http://cloud.example.com/"

  # The ProxyRequests directive should usually be set off when using ProxyPass.
  # src:https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_proxy.html#proxypass          
  ProxyRequests off

  # https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_proxy.html#proxypreservehost \
  # This option should normally be turned Off.                                  
  ProxyPreserveHost off

On the owncloud server

You need to explicitly add the trusted proxies, also you need to override the webroot, otherwise it won't work because the URLs will be malformed.

<?php
$CONFIG = array (
  # for roundcube owncloud plugin                                                     
  # https://doc.owncloud.org/server/8.2/admin_manual/configuration_server/reverse_pro\
xy_configuration.html                                                       
  "overwritewebroot"  => "/cloud",          
  'trusted_proxies' => array ('10.10.10.20','10.10.10.19'),
  'roundcube_owncloud_des_key' => 'some des key',
...
)

Caveats

The downside of this is that the original http://cloud.example.com won't work again because of the overriden webroot.